Heavensent
by Ophidian Blue
Summary: "I can only restore," she tells him. "I am unable to destroy with what madness I harness from the sky. Skyfire burns righteous but weak." He is silent a moment, except for quick and jagged breaths. "Yes, I understand," the devil finally answers. "And so, the heavensent will leave mercy to the discretion...of the crows..."
1. It was told

**Disclaimer: I don't own League of Legends. If I did, it would be a much politer place.**

The angel's face twists.

And from her soft and devastated lips falls a gentle sound.

Often, she has seen blood (but so rarely her own). The scarlet stains her hands like silk, rivers down her hip to be swallowed by the unsympathetic soil. Her attacker stands but an arm's length away, observing the way she clenches her fist as if to close the wound.

"Why have you done this?" come her ragged words.

"You have been important to me," the grey man says, a far cry from the apology her eyes demand. "And you will continue to be important in sacrifice."

"Why?" she repeats. The syllable throbs in time with her pulse.

"Your _heart_," he says.

She thinks, in the surreal haze of death, that this beast of a man is speaking of love. Her thoughts flicker like a flame fading.

No, she realizes. Not love. Something obsessive and dangerous like love, but...not love.

"A fool you've made of me," she whispers. Tears fall like heaven's stars from the melting gold of her eyes.

The pain is real. She knows by instinct that this is the blackest pain, the pain of death, the pain which has been driven into retreat so often by her hands.

"So I have," he says, not regretful. And then, "goodbye, fair creature."

He steps forward bearing the blade of her demise, he steps forward to spill her heart's blood below a sky full of gleaming witnesses. Their light catches in the angle of metal, glints a warning.

"Hear me only once more," she cries to them, the traitorous stars. "This violence cannot go unanswered!"

For a moment, there is only silence. The burning, moving kind of silence that so often shadows before the first lightning slash of the storm.

And then, all at once, the light rains down in agreement, sing-slashing the air like thin blades.

And to them, his flesh flaming with shards of skyfire, the sinister man howls in fury and agony. "She has betrayed you!" he screams through tightly clenched teeth, the disjointed anger of a madman. "_She has betrayed you_!"

"Gracefully," the angel sighs in what she fears are her last breaths, watching in weakness as the heavenly onslaught continues. "For my transgression. This…is my path…"

A shattered growl, more sinister than ever were the voices of men. And then, low and searing, "I am not finished…with _you_…"

"Gracefully," she says again, straining to be heard above the flaming whispers of the stars' attack. "Only in grace."

But he is gone already from the range of her voice, already moving in an agonized stagger back to the hell from which he came.

A final flare, and her saviors, too, are silent.

_I have failed._ A quiet revelation.

And yet…

Where the knife had wedded her flesh, there is no pain. She finds herself able to draw a shaking, life-filled breath into her lungs.

Lethargic but not demolished, she uprights herself. She sighs, exhales her gratitude.

And far above, in a world not hers, the stars flicker and dim, nodding their love to her one last time.


	2. Abandon

On the sea, there is no birdsong.

The soft darkness of pre-dawn:- the only sounds are ones made by lashing waves, the folding uncertain saltwaters that baptize against the ship.

The break of day, the hours before noontime:- the wind is a slash, tangling sails and clothing and cloudwisps. Uniformed people mill about the deck under milky sunrays, seeing to the mysteries that keep the ship intact and afloat. When undiluted by tree canopies and the silhouettes of small animals, the sunlight is hard. Bladed. People complain about it in quiet half-interest, filling their idle minutes with the laziness of annoyance, subtle.

An inch past sunset: the sea-sounds peak. The comings and goings of passengers below deck, mutterings and gentle conversations, accented words and syllables of laughter. The plodding sounds of their crossings over the hollow wood, light steps, pacing steps, thundered steps. They wander over in afterthoughts to peer across the sea under the unintrusive starlight. A cough, a shifting of limbs, the soundless tilting of self-contained thoughts. The floating moon looms full and far away, monitoring all their unrest, all the tessellations of the waves.

But on the sea, amongst the wind and waves, the whispers and footfalls, there is no birdsong.

On the sea, the starchild has come to learn, there are no birds.

She laments this across days and nights from nearby the splintered, brine-battered railings at the head of the vessel. She laments it across the sea's spasms, in the air between her body and the moon's. She laments it to her hands, which curl around each other without her knowing. She laments it always to herself, always in her mind's voice and not her throat's.

She is finished giving away words. (This, she tells herself, over and over and over…)

The silence is one she can hardly help but inflict upon herself, the silence of lacking words, the sighing kind of silence that functions like knots and shackles. The other passengers pay her no heed, mostly, in the manner that strangers often will when they come face to face with a silence as dangerous as hers.

Once, she met someone's gaze, and if gazes could cut through bone…

On the fourth night, the final night, the crew and passengers have a feast of sorts. On the deck at her back, they spread out a blue-clothed table and pile on it a random assortment of fare, unsteady glasses of ginger and rose-colored wines, a healthy smattering of conversation and laughter and story-sharing.

On the fourth night, the final night, she looks away from the sky for the first time. She has not pleaded with them. (Only to herself. Only a little. Only without meaning to, like blinking, breathing, knowing, the way an amnesic might flinch at iterations of memories unseen, unfelt, un-anything.)

Late into the night, the crowd removes itself, all the voices and the tables and the wines. She hardly hears their noise by then. Not long after, the fifth dawn draws hazy lines onto the hemline of the sky.

"Expecting landfall at mid-afternoon," someone says, she overhears.

Alone, she watches the bone-white shoreline stitch itself between the harmony of blues.


	3. Time

**A/N: I have updated this to correct random formatting errors three different times, and they seem to keep appearing somewhere else every time I re-submit. Please excuse them if they show up. Or send me angry messages if it violently offends you and you need to vent. -t**

He says it cautiously, as though the words are antiques. "Miss," he says. "If I may - you're not really dressed for this country."

As the wind changes, she begins to think the same. Certainty is quick. Severe, the air makes cold friction in her lungs, along her arms. Her blood is the last feeble flicker of a dead sun.

"I'll acquire what I need." She is not used to wondering how. She is vaguely used to needing. The riddle of divinity, that the divine so futilely approach what indiscriminately troubles everyone else.

But she will need something to guard her from the air in this land, the forlorn gusting so deeply unfamiliar. Around her, the other passengers have donned thicker fabrics. Animal garb, wool and fur layered over colorless and threadbare patterns manmade. They are in the part of the world where it's less of a necessity to be fashionable than it is not to freeze to death; there are countries where vibrant dress is integral to survival, but freezing to death is not a thing that happens everywhere. It happens here, in this land of one-season; mostly, it happens to the ill-prepared.

Foreigners. Strangers.

_I am a stranger in this land_, she realizes. This land, where the stars are the vestiges of ice-tipped arrows, holes ripped in the black fabric of the sky. Where the great arctic goddess hunted the world into existence eons ago. This is not the land of horned and hooved gods; this is the land of snow gods, war gods, the land where gods wield weapons crafted of wood and sweat and metal. This is the land of proud hunters, with their necklaces of bear teeth and wet blue war paints, with their long, snow-sheen hair and shaggy furs.

She is not used to being a stranger.

"Where can I trade for what I need?" she asks the shipman.

"Trade?" He scrunches his face, rubs his thumb and forefinger against stubble the color of dirt. "It being a port city, you shouldn't have too much trouble finding someplace. Y'know, they may take Ionian monies though." He offers the last part kindly, helpful in the good-deed-for-the-day sort of way.

"Be well," she says. Her eyes have settled upon a shop window already.

Inside, a clatter of small bones fastened together with violet threads announces her entry. But the old woman doesn't have to appear from the darkness of a backroom; she's already at the counter with her needlework, waiting for business.

"You aren't dressed for the Freljord," the woman says, looking up only for an icy moment.

"Seems so." She approaches the counter and not the hanging racks of cloaks and wools. "However," she says, "I've been warned that Ionian money is no good here."(This, she says instead of admitting that she has none.)

The woman shakes her head. The clay beads in her ears, small spheres the color of rotted pomegranates, shake with it. "You're right," she says. "But you'll run into the same problem in every small town around here. The bigger ones, they'll take foreign money. Usually. But it takes too long for emissaries to get out here to exchange, and shopkeepers got enough headaches in these parts."

"I understand," she says. "I'm not sure I can reach a larger town this way. They tell me that foreigners never last long on the tundra." But as she speaks, she realizes that no one has said these words to her; she's only read or misread them off of their bodies.

"Most don't." The old woman says it without looking up from her patchwork.

"Would you consider a trade?"

"I'd consider it. Note I said _consider_. What are you offering up?"

The starchild shifts on her hooves. "I'm a healer," she says.

There is a terse moment, a moment of vivid silence.

And then the old woman places her needlework on the counter carefully, gives her entire gaze and her full attention to the tensely swaying starchild. But her eyes, cataracted the harmless white of ghosts, are not politely interested so much as they are slitted for war. "What sort of healer?"

"The real kind," she says. "Not the charlatan kind. Not the kind who milks vipers and sings prayers over vials of river water." The kind who whispers worships to the belt of Orion, she does not say.

"Alright then." The suspicion has not left, predictably. "Isn't very common to find a healer around here. We aren't much for healers."

"I know," she says. And she does. She respects the organic society that they are, the kind who still wears vibrant beads and braids in silvery hair, the kind who trains their aging eyesight by the shifting shadows just beyond the arrow's tip. Such societies are distrustful of those who claim to absorb maladies; hunters believe safety is lying dead in the arms of their gods.

(The risk of bleeding to death is often a catalyst for conversion.)

The old woman clasps her calloused hands. "Okay, real healer. Can you heal hearts, then? From loss?"

Her question is equal amounts caustic and helpless, though the helplessness is veiled and vanishing. The starchild takes a breath, releases it. "The pain of loss is an invisible wound," she answers, cautiously, in the gentle voice of someone who has played ghost games with words and questions many times before. "Invisible wounds are rarely the business of healers."

"Whose business, then?"

"Only time. The great healer."

"The great _destroyer_," the old woman corrects. "And surely you see, that doesn't help me." She gestures to herself in a short motion, indicates the visiting of time she has known already.

"Who have you lost?" the starchild asks.

Her gaze is level. "You know, they don't send elders to war," she says, nodding. "But all that really gives you is the opportunity to survive your children."

Their breathing fills a pause. When the starchild speaks, she is careful to sound sagely, to make meteors of her words that only impact like whispers. "That's because the contracts of man are fallible." She clasps her hands together in mimic of the woman before her. "Time," she says, potent, "is a god unfazed by our whims. A beautiful contract. Infallible, unbreakable. We are meant to respect and believe in this contract, above all else. And as so, we must _trust_ in it. We must trust in time."

"You haven't had enough life to teach me about time," the woman says, swinging the trophy of her silver braids behind her shoulder, mashing her lips together like bricks in a wall. "A pleasant little snippet of wizard wisdom that I'm sure you have no choice but to buy into, doing what you do. But the truth is: nobody credits the chariot that drags them off to the gallows for saving their life."

"I would say that it depends," the starchild says, unmoving, "on whether you consider life the act of breathing or the act of understanding. The chariot is not the mechanism by which death saves you, no. But time saves all things equally, as thoroughly as they want to be saved."

"If you mean the nonsense you're gabbing, then the world only barely needs you and your kind at all. There's more pain than flesh everywhere you go. And maybe any magic that only works across the surface might not be worth having."

"My magic is a promise fulfilled by time," the starchild answers, shaking her head. She wonders briefly where her rage is hiding, why her words echo hollowly in her throat. "What I mean to say," she adds, "is that to be healed, the manipulation of flesh and blood and bone comes first. And then you have to trust the afterward."

The old woman's shoulders rise slightly, and the next breath she takes is smooth and steadying like steel.

"You are all only ever charlatans, river water or not," she mutters, thickly prejudiced. "Take your furs and wander off into the frost of your death, if time will have it."

Once she has quickly and quietly approached the bone-draped door, a threadbare cloak in hand, the starchild turns back only to say, "be well." And then she leaves with the cloak wrapped about her shoulders, her journey looming ahead, her mouth emptied of all the words she once believed.


End file.
